Cowards & Sons
by inelegantprose
Summary: A newly-teenage Ben can't understand why his mother wouldn't want to become a Jedi. Leia struggles to explain.


"Hey Ma?"

Leia glanced up from her notes – her son was still sprawled across both of the chairs before her desk (he seemed to always be doing that these days – sprawling, legs skinny and akimbo and too long for thirteen), but his datapad was overturned and he looked – not concerned, but genuinely curious – maybe consternated. She flicked her eyes back down and kept reading, ready to remind him where the 'fresher was for the umpteenth time, and asked, "Yes-my-darling?"

She didn't have to be looking at him to know that he cringed at the saccharine address – Han did too, thought it was unbelievably cloying, had never been a big fan of Leia bopping the baby out of its hysterics while murmuring shh-my-beloved-shh-my-darling but it was what she'd been called, and as long as she was doing the comforting she'd do what she pleased, and who were they performing for, anyway?

He bit his lip like she did, deliberating, and she couldn't help but smile. Ben was home ('home' being a relative term given how often they moved) on a rare break from training, and though he seemed to have slept for the full forty-eight standard hours of his first two days home, today he'd been eager to tag along with her to work as he'd done for almost six years of his life. Splayed out before her, he'd spent most of the morning intently reading a novel and piping up only occasionally, the two of them working in a contemplative, content silence. He was diligent and serious, loved to read almost as much as she did, and his company felt shockingly lovely.

Until: "Was I an accident?"

And suddenly Leia felt herself choke, just a little. "Excuse me?"

He didn't seem upset, just interested. "Was I an accident, Ma?"

"Who told you such a thing?"

Ben rolled his eyes. "Maths."

Leia pressed her lips into a firm line. "Maths."

"When you and Dad got married. Versus when I was born."

"We were married before you were born."

"Barely."

"Ben!"

His smile was smug, just a little. "I know I was born early, Ma, but not that early."

"You were a wanted child," Leia said seriously. "Very wanted." Still are, she found herself thinking, pushing her thoughts forward just a tiny bit as she flicked her eyes back down to her work, even as a sullen not-quite-teenager.

"But I wasn't planned," he pressed.

"What are you getting at, Ben?" She frowned into her work. "If you're looking to pester, you should join your father in the hangar."

His eyes were twinkling now: "To pester him or to learn how to better pester you?"

"Oh, gods, I hope the former." Kept scanning data – her work in recent years had consolidated specifically around slavery, and the information was woefully incomplete – it was so difficult to differentiate between indentured servitude, actual legal slavery, and every other variation of forced labor that permeated the galaxy…

Ben frowned, not listening – "Anyway, he'll just put me to work on the Falcon. Like always."

"Watch yourself. You learned to walk on that ship."

"I know, Ma," he said, rolling his eyes like she was an absolute bantha-brain. "I was there."

"You were a baby, you don't remember that." (If her voice a bit clipped and dismissive, it was only because she was so caught off guard by this whole line of questioning to begin with.)

"I do, Mama," he said seriously. "I remember everything."

For a second she was skeptical, but he looked at her so earnestly she felt a jolt in her gut. Everything? Spitting up on foreign dignitaries and sitting diligently with his thumb in his mouth while she presented military strategies, the diplomatic mission crashed by lingering Imperials during which she hid with him in a sewer system with one hand over his mouth and the other gripping a blaster, every awkward bonfire reunion with the Rogues, every unexpected two month span where her or Han bid the other one and the baby goodbye and every planet or moon they'd ever lived on, the year in which he could only sleep with one of them beside him and how for six years they lived as nomads, the three of them like the last little pack of some almost-extinct species migrating every six standard months…

"If you remembered everything," she said lightly, "you'd remember that you and I get along so famously because we both like to work quietly."

"Mast—Uncle Luke says you do too, said you remember your mother. From when you were born." He looked earnest, eager, almost was leaning in.

She felt herself grow just a bit rigid but kept her tone teasing. "Do you and your uncle spend much time discussing me?"

"I didn't know you were so strong with the Force!"

Leia sat up even straighter, her spine a diplomatic column. "Hm, I don't know if I'd put it that way."

"You could've been a Jedi, Ma!"

"Is that so."

"Master—Uncle Luke says you could've. And you used to use it, too. The Force? When I was smaller, I remember."

"Of course, you remember everything," she said, trying to smile a bit.

"And then you stopped."

"Well, you got older and learned how to talk. So I didn't have to use it anymore to talk to you."

Ben scoffed: "And Dad hated it."

She frowned: "That isn't true. Not at all."

"You could've been a Jedi," he said, his voice becoming that startingly serious way again. "You could've. And then you had me."

"I know your dad and I don't get to see you as much these days, but you should know me well enough to know that being your mother never stopped me from doing anything – or don't you remember that you were at military briefings when you were two weeks old?" She couldn't help herself – she reached out and touched his hair, smiling a bit. He reddened and rolled his eyes, pulling away. "Tsk. Such a teenager, and you've only been one for a week."

Ben muttered something that sounded a lot like, when you were a teenager you fought in battles but she couldn't be sure.

She frowned at him. "What's wrong, beloved?"

"I just." He frowned, scrunched up his face. "I don't understand why you wouldn't want to join the Order. If you could've, with a baby? If you're strong with the Force, like Master Luke says. I mean, your father was—"

She shook her head sharply, cutting off that line of inquiry.

"You could still learn. I could – give you lessons, or Master Luke—"

"Uncle—"

"It's not too late, Ma. You're strong. With the Force. I know you are." He smiled at her, radiant, teasing – "You know there are a lot of girls there too, you always tell me to remember that girls can do anything boys can do, so."

She knows Han would use this opportunity to tease him, ruffle him up, laugh – anything you want to tell me about you and these girls, kid? They giving you the star treatment? Instead, she said simply, "I don't want that," then brushed back her hair, and added, light as air, "and anyway, you wouldn't want your mother tagging along."

"You don't want what?"

"Hmm?

"You don't want what? To be a Jedi."

"Oh. Yes." She smiled again, a little annoyed, settled back to her work. "I was thinking we would grab lunch in mess in an hour or two, how does that sound?"

"Why don't you want that? How could you not—"

"Ben. Enough."

"Ma. Just help me understand."

Leia cringed – he'd lifted that, word for word, from Han, it was uncanny and weird and something he only said when they were fighting bad – but sighed. "Well. I… believe in diplomacy. And negotiation, and nuance. And the Force traffics… more in absolutes."

"Absolutes of good versus evil," Ben defended, miffed.

"Right, but the work that I do is a bit more complicated than that."

"Well, it doesn't have to be, though. There's like… there's the Light, and the Dark. Even if you work in politics."

"In politics – in real life – there are also differing cultural values, and stakes, and, you know, motivating factors."

Ben frowned deeply. "The motivating factors of the Force are good and evil, it's actually pretty simple."

"Mm."

"It's simple."

"It just. Mm – it isn't useful for me to – I don't see the world in that same way. I think that good people are – I think everyone has their own agenda. And I think – I think I am and always have been less interested in teasing out moral absolutes and more interested in making the choice that helps the most and hurts the least while also staying ethical. Does that make sense?"

Ben frowned even deeper. "The thing that will in the long run help the most people is to follow the Light, Ma, no matter what cost."

"When you're older you'll understand."

"I'll be your age soon," he said, scowling. "How old you were when you were on the Death Star with grandfather—"

"And I hope you'll have a much better time of nineteen than I did," she said briskly.

"How could you not believe in – the Dark is what killed your people!"

"Does your uncle ever talk to you about what the Empire wanted? The 'Dark.' Palpatine, Vader, what they wanted?"

"To bring about the rise of the Sith," Ben said evenly. "And the Dark."

"See, that is deeply unnerving."

"What! That you don't care about The Dark—?"

"No, that you don't know about – that he doesn't teach you about – trade monopolies for cronies and destabilizing local governments by redrawing territory lines to pit different ethnic groups against each other, or the need for a complacent free labor force to support their rising military costs?" She felt her control slipping, temper rising, but he had to know, didn't he? "The bad guys? They aren't motivated by a universal monolithic evil, they are motivated by greed."

"Then what about the good guys?" Ben said tightly. "Hmm?"

"When you work hard, when you train hard, you do it for a lot of reasons, right? To please your Dad and I, to impress your friends?"

"I do it for the Light, Ma," he said, rigid and pointed and righteous.

"When you get older you may find that the rest of us aren't so noble. And it would – behoove you to be skeptical of everyone's motivations…"

"If you don't – if you hate the Jedi, why would you send me—?"

"Don't deliberately misunderstand me, I never said I hated – I was just explaining why I didn't—"

"When I asked Master Luke he said it was because you loved Dad too much," he said thickly. "And the Order demands that you detach yourself…"

"But you won't detach yourself from me and your father."

Ben shrugged darkly, like a teenager, like someone she didn't know, and for a flicker even she felt him, his fuming energy.

"Ben."

"I thought it was like – romantic, or whatever."

"You know how I feel about 'whatever'…"

"And also? Ma? I always like – I feel like you're totally blind. And I always knew – I always knew Dad was blind, duh, but you and I – well."

"Please don't speak about your father like that – please..."

"I thought you and I saw eye-to-eye. Like everything in common, Ma, we have everything – feeling like outsiders always and reading books and paying attention and wanting to be rational – but you don't get it either, and it's like – did you ever?"

"If you're going to speak to me like this, you'll need to find somewhere else to spend your afternoon."

"Why are you so scared? Of your power, of—"

"My power. My power. No – I think I am scared? Of my son talking back to me, saying nasty things about his father, growing taller than me before he's even thirteen, not even knowing anything about the very system I've dedicated my whole life to deconstructing and rebuilding, of you leaving all of us behind and detaching, a son who blithely calls a genocidal murderer 'grandfather.' That is what I am scared of. Something as silly? As the Force? Does not scare me." She pressed her lips together. "Darling, we raised you better than to be so cowardly."


End file.
